Monthly Archives: April 2018

I’ve been antic­i­pat­ing this weekend’s première of Upstate Obscura for some time. The piece (a cello concerto written for Inbal Segev and Metrop­o­lis Ensemble) has been in some stage of the working process since 2014, when Inbal first asked me about writing it. I set her up with Metrop­o­lis (who are old friends, having commis­sioned no less than threepieces) and then we all arrived at the Metro­pol­i­tan Museum, where I settled on writing a piece about John Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama (detail above) which occupies its own room in the American Wing.

The piece itself was written over the past summer and fall, and I returned to the panorama many times during the writing process. It’s my first concerto for an instru­ment other than piano, a circum­stance which presented its own set of chal­lenges. Here’s a short note about the painting, and how exactly it informs the piece:

The question of what consti­tutes “Amer­i­can­ness” in art has long inter­ested me. It’s a somewhat self-serving interest, of course, since I’m an American composer. But it’s useful to think about. It was little more than 100 years ago that composers started writing music that sounded “American,” tran­scend­ing the Euro­cen­tric pastiches of earlier efforts. It’s a recent enough occur­rence that one can still imagine differ­ent paths composers could’ve taken, could still take. In this spirit, Upstate Obscura is a kind of thought exper­i­ment set in the primor­dial ooze of the 19th century, when American artists mostly looked to repli­cate European models.

John Vander­lyn was one such artist—an ambi­tious painter from Kingston, New York, who spent years studying in Paris. Upon his return, he formed a grand (and misguided) plan to paint a gigantic panoramic scene of the palace and gardens of Versailles, and to exhibit the 360-degree work inside a rotunda of his own construc­tion, in the hope of securing his repu­ta­tion and fortune. But Amer­i­cans had little interest in paying to see a replica of a fancy French palace; the work was simul­ta­ne­ously too real­is­tic and too abstract to cause anything but befud­dle­ment among the Kingsto­ni­ans of its day. The panorama was a finan­cial failure and faded into obscu­rity until the 1950s, when the Metro­pol­i­tan Museum built a passage­way in the American Wing to display it.

I stumbled on it there a few years ago (if one can speak of “stum­bling” on a thing so massive). I was taken aback by its sheer scale, and also by the tricky way it uses perspec­tive to convey even greater scale. But the overall effect of the painting is ambigu­ous; it’s hyper-detailed, yet curi­ously abstract; perfectly utopian, but with a sombre, melan­choly cast. The light in the painting is a flat upstate New York light, and the viewer feels alone in it, ignored by the well-dressed spec­ta­tors milling about. In taking on a quin­tes­sen­tially French subject, Vander­lyn somehow came up with some­thing that feels American; it seems to regard Versailles at a bemused distance, with that char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally American distrust of anything unnec­es­sar­ily fanciful. As a New Englan­der who has never been to Versailles (Vanderlyn’s intended audience, after all), I iden­ti­fied with this out-of-place­ness.

It was that uncanny sense of contra­dic­tion and tension in the painting that started me thinking about it as the subject for a piece of music. My plan was to start with frag­ments of musical ornament from the French Baroque tradition—like loose chunks of masonry—and stretch them out until they no longer felt like orna­ments. All the melodic material in Upstate Obscura is gener­ated this way. Each movement takes those stretched-out frag­ments and points them in differ­ent direc­tions; I wanted to use register, and tran­si­tions between regis­ters, as a way to trans­late the forced perspec­tive of the panorama into a sonic illusion of physical space. The solo cello moves through these regis­ters, just as a viewer might explore a virtual world—at times wander­ing, at times with purpose.

The first movement, “Valley of strange shapes,” finds the soloist moving slowly down a grand, sweeping stair­case, past stylized musical objects played by the orches­tra. The second finds the same protag­o­nist lost in a topiary maze, or hall of mirrors; the music keeps restart­ing, turning back on itself, refract­ing into smaller reflec­tions. “Vanish­ing Point,” an extended coda, turns its gaze upwards, towards an indis­tinct horizon.

At the Vander­lyn panorama at the Met. Photo by Karsten Moran for the New York Times.

Update 4/20/18: The New York Times published a detailed look (with audio excerpts from a rehearsal) at how the Vander­lyn panorama relates to Upstate Obscura.